Google Chrome

[Gavin Scott]

I'm finding some of the tech chat here a little impenetrable.

I used chrome last night. Liked it. Nice and fast.

Then it crashed while I looked at some videos on YouTube.

I think I'll leave it a bit while they iron out some beta bugs.

[marksi]

I crashed it with full-screen BBC iPlayer.

I must try this Firefox 3 thing you speak of. Been a long time since I had a go at that.

[Netizen]

hyma/cdd: Oh well I knew I was too easily impressed by such things. I knew nothing about HTA and Gecko 2.0, I feel as if I've lost some geek points today

[Finn]

Oh, and it has a spell checker

Which doesn't recognise the word Google...

[Ebeneezer Scrooge]

The register has a concerning article... seems they own anything you type in their browser.

Regardless of the above, I won't be using a google browser simply for the fact that they know enough about me from my web searches. I don't want to let go of any last bits of privacy by even potentially handing it over to google.
I can't help but feel that most (if not all) google software is essentially spyware - it was google themselves who recently admitted total privacy doesn't exist.

[lukey]

The register has a concerning article... seems they own anything you type in their browser.

Regardless of the above, I won't be using a google browser simply for the fact that they know enough about me from my web searches. I don't want to let go of any last bits of privacy by even potentially handing it over to google.
I can't help but feel that most (if not all) google software is essentially spyware - it was google themselves who recently admitted total privacy doesn't exist.

Noticed that earlier today, and the blogosphere has predictably spazzed over it. It appears to be a clumsily worded EULA rather than Google trying to own your opinions - the definiton of 'the Services' originally referring to the likes of YouTube where uploading your content there grants them the right to reuse - but it seems to have been lazily adapted to include Chrome whilst losing its relevance.

I doubt if pushed, Google's lawyers would pretend they are actually trying to claim ownership of everything you submit via Chrome, but they really really need to avoid getting caught in these kinds of 'mistakes' (assuming that's what this is ).

But I don't think Google "admitting" total privacy doesn't exist is quite the way to put it - that suggests Google has some sort of monopoly on privacy and they decide how privacy is applied, but they are right - there is no absolute privacy. I don't think that "admission" has to reflect on their business practises. I don't think every move Google have made has been great, or necessarily justified, including the basic need for Chrome - but I've never been compelled to feel particularly exposed just because Google happens to gather a lot of metrics about my search habits.

[Jamez]

I don't like the URL flashing up where the status box at the bottom of the screen should be.

I've tried to see if I can turn it off - or even better reinstate a status bar - but can't.

I wonder if StumbleUpon works with Chrome?

[cdd]

Well I strongly feel there isn't space for another browser in the market. Now we're up to FIVE major browsers, many people (myself included) aren't going to know what to pick.

Metropol may be a tech savvy audience, but can you expect the average web user to cough up "IE/Firefox/Safari/Opera/Chrome"? Most people don't even think about a browser, and I speculate a large percentage of Firefox users, for example, didn't choose it for themselves but got it bundled with software and made default browser, or had it installed by someone else.

This situation hasn't bothered me so far. I mean, I like Firefox. And the other browsers all have a place in the world - Opera has existed for a long time as a sideline browser alternative, and IE and Safari come wtih OSs. But with the rise of tedious browsers like Chrome, which really don't have a place in the world and do nothing new and only serves to advance Google's own interests, what we're going to get is endless software bundled with browser / OEM PCs including several browsers / web sites telling you to use this browser / etc. In other words, an endless torrent of browser advertising. A nasty situation involving affiliate links and browser sniffing javascript and redefining start menu shortcuts without asking you and so on. Gmail will probably start announcing that you can't use certain features unless you use Chrome. Mark my words. One year from now, you will have Chrome forced upon you in all sorts of ways.

[Mr Q]

Well I strongly feel there isn't space for another browser in the market. Now we're up to FIVE major browsers, many people (myself included) aren't going to know what to pick.

I would postulate, cdd, that you're wrong. What we're witnessing is competition at work. I don't know why you think it's difficult to know which browser to pick. That's like saying you don't know which breakfast cereal or pair of shoes to buy. Consumers are faced with choices all the time and somehow they're able to make them. They choose what they perceive will maximise their well-being.

A new entrant of Google's calibre is likely to lead to significant new innovations in browsing. This is a good thing. So long as all browsers roughly adhere to the same standards (in terms of interpreting and displaying internet content), then this is unlikely to impose a substantial cost for website developers. Moreover, it should also drive quality improvements. Given the relatively low cost nowadays of switching between browsers, if one particular program is seen to be of sub-standard performance, then we should expect to see people substituting away from that browser to another. The only issue here is how less tech-savvy users will respond - many of whom use IE because that's simply what they know. Yet chances are that they'll also use Google for searching, because that's all they'll know. And you can be sure that Google will promote the hell out of Chrome. Indeed, if you look at all the players in the software industry at the moment, I reckon Google is probably the only one with the reach to seriously challenge Microsoft's current market share.

[Pete]

Indeed if google were to pull more people onto chrome, likely those who hadn't heard of firefox and were on IE through ignorance, it's at least getting them onto a browser with a decent core (WebKit). Therefore if pages break in Chrome the webmasters have to change to web standards rather than iffy IE stuff which benefits both Opera and Mozilla due to their adherance to web standards too.

[lukey]

Google tweaks Chrome licence text

Just to revisit that privacy issue actually. Forever everyone has been talking about the holy grail of the 'semantic web', and it would seem to me that Google have probably made the biggest leaps in this. An example - because almost every Google search I've made in the last couple of years has been bound to my Google account, my search results are now tailored so that if I was to search the word 'split', I have MSDN articles and php.net docs pushed to the very top of the search results, rather than info about the Croatian city of Split - this pleases me.